Nowadays, keyboards are the most important and popular input devices of computer equipments. There are many kinds of keyboards, such as mechanical keyboards, membrane keyboards, conductive rubber keyboards, and capacitive keyboards. These keyboards are usually called physical keyboards, which are made up of separate keys with gaps between them. It is difficult to clean the keyboards, since the dust fall into the gaps and accumulate in the gaps easily. After some time, the dust may lead to failure in the work of keyboard. In addition, they have the defects of poor hand feeling, large noise, and rapid wearing, and with the capacitive keyboard, its manufacturing process is relatively more complicated. Furthermore, it is required to mark symbols (such as letters or characters) on the keys of the physical keyboards in different languages for users from different countries, which would lead to inconvenience in switching among different languages. For example, in this industry, laser engraving is a conventional method of marking symbols on the keys. However, once the letters or characters are engraved, it's hard to make alteration. Furthermore, when a mistake has been made, the whole keyboard has to be redone or scrapped.
In recent years, writing pad becomes another popular input device and it is more convenient using writing pad to input information for some users than aforementioned keyboards. However, it cannot work without a specific stylus. Furthermore, sometimes, the writing pad is always used together with aforementioned keyboards. In this case, these two separate devices will take more space in the workplace.
Thus, there is a need of a new input device to overcome the shortcomings of physical keyboards and writing pads and that which integrates the keyboard with a writing pad and a computer mouse.